Snake races commemorate settlers

What you end up with is the World Championship Rattlesnake Races, run for the past three decades to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in this tiny South Texas town settled by Irish immigrants in the early 1800s.

The basic idea is simple - pay $20 to rent a rattler, put it down on the ground and do what it takes to coax him along a grassy strip to the finish line 80 feet away. Nine other people are trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Racers are equipped with a 6-foot plastic rod - called a "gitter," as in "to git along" - to help them with the job. Some use it to beat the ground next to the snake to create vibrations, while others walk behind and tap the grass with the tip or scrape the surface.

There are a few rules, like no smacking the snake. Not only would that be completely uncalled-for, it would also be bad strategy.

"If you get out in front of him, he's gonna stop," said Jack Lewis, the race's general manager. "If you touch him, he's gonna coil up and try to strike."

Making a champion is the centerpiece of the annual two-day St. Patrick's Day festival. Five heats were run on Saturday and another five on Sunday, with the winners of each heat squaring off in the main event.

The ultimate winner was Don Burkman of Austin, who swung his gitter like an ax to urge his rented Western diamondback to victory in 69 seconds.

"I was smacking (the ground) pretty good," he said afterward. "He slowed down on me last time. I wanted to keep him going."

Stacy Mills of Aransas Pass, another finalist, said there's a danger rush that comes with racing rattlers.

"It's a snake, and you're afraid it's going to turn around and snap at you," she said.

The racing idea came up in the early 1970s, when some history-minded residents were trying to come up with a way to raise funds to restore structures in Old San Patricio and build a museum to house Mexican lances, cannonballs and other artifacts found in the area.

The St. Patrick's Day festival began in the 1870s, and the first rattlers were raced here in 1973.

"It was wild," Lewis recalled. "We didn't know what we were doing. We had these snakes all over the place."

The event started small, but steadily grews. Now the festival, which features carnival rides, live music and crafts and food kiosks - one of which sells small portions of fried rattlesnake meat - attracts as many as 10,000 people each year.

A local snake-handler accompanies the racer down the 80-foot course for protection, to offer racing tips and to pick up the snake should it veer into another lane.

The snakes used in Old San Patricio come from "rattlesnake roundups" in west Texas, a decades-old tradition started to reduce the snake populations.

Animal-rights groups denounce rounding up and racing rattlesnakes.

Teresa Telecky, a zoologist with the Humane Society of the United States, said "these are some of the most deliberately cruel public events existing today."

Telecky, based in Gaithersburg, Md., says gasoline is often sprayed into rattler dens to flush out the snakes, which are then captured and kept in large bins, often without food or water.

"You are basically harassing a wild animal," she said. "A lot of traditions in Texas need to be changed, and this is one of them."

Lewis said his group has received letters from the Humane Society that urge them to put an end to the races.

"We don't pay much attention to that," he said. "'They've never been down here."